Adriana brought flowers because she knew he liked them. Bennett wasn’t gone yet, but he soon would be, and the calculating pragmatism they shared told her to bring them now, while he could still enjoy them. 
Chrysanthemums were his favorite and she had been fortunate to find a dozen — enormous and explosively red – at the Shop-Rite just off Chambers Street. Down just a block from the store, trudging through the gray Manhattan bitterness toward Mt. Sinai Hospital, she had been accosted by a haggard homeless woman to whom she had given one of the flowers. Even better, she had thought coming up in the elevator to the fifth floor ICU, eleven mums and a gesture for a total stranger, apt metaphor for what would soon be Bennett’s too-short life.
For the moment, she was still managing to keep things more or less together. Gone was the shock of initial diagnosis. How such things came to pass was anyone’s guess. In fact, he had taken the news much better than she. Just a month to live, maybe two at the outside, yet he had carried on with the nurses as though he was looking for a prom date. Kill a man – maybe, she thought, stepping into the dimly-lit room, but never his spirit, his nature.
Laying the flowers on the nightstand, she leaned down, kissed Bennett’s forehead, and whispered into his ear, “Hey, beautiful.” More tubes had been added in the twelve hours since she had last visited. Now Bennett could move his head only a few degrees to either side without dislodging something of apparent importance. Only his eyes were truly free to roam about the room, which they did immediately upon Adriana’s gently proffered greeting. Pearl-white, opalescent, his gaze finally found hers, and his lips imperceptibly creaked apart in attempted rejoinder. Quavering faint gurgles were all he could now manage, but the effort meant that he still knew her, was still in there.
Reaching for the chrysanthemums, she held them momentarily within his field of vision. Smiling as well as she could manage, Adriana briefly retold the story of the woman on the sidewalk, explaining why there were only eleven flowers in the bouquet. To show that he understood, that he grasped the simple beauty of Adriana’s small gesture, Bennett managed, with Herculean effort, to raise his left hand from the bed and feebly grip hers. Unable to keep up the smile, unwilling to let him see her break down, she rose from the bed and stepped to the window, staring through tears out across the bleak New York winter landscape. Vivid images of their short time together danced across the white landscape. White like new hospital sheets, like torn dreams, like fantasy places whose photos fade with time. Xanadu, Fantasia, Heaven – places where people live happily ever after and don’t die halfway through their lives. Yearning, Adriana turned from the window, half expecting to see his phantom standing watch over the room. Zeitgeist – quite literally, the spirit of the time, their time – sitting comfortably, patiently, in the corner of the room, his arm insouciantly draped round the woman from the sidewalk, his withered hand clutching a single red chrysanthemum.